Memories of displaced persons find a home

It has been said that every picture tells a story. Few, though, have as much to say as an image on a banner at the Ukrainian National Museum of Chicago.

It shows a group of expressionless men and women standing outside a brick building. In the middle of the photo is a woman in a white dress, next to a tall man. Taken in 1946 in a displaced persons camp in Lebach, Germany, this is Bohdan Dudycz's parents' wedding photo.

"If you look, this picture encapsulates the poverty of the camp," says Dudycz, a member of the museum's board. "My mother had to borrow her dress. My father had to borrow a suit. My mother said to him, 'You have to have a tie.' But nobody had a tie in the camp. So she went and got a piece of paper, like from a typewriter, cut out the shape of a tie and pinned it to his shirt."

Poverty, yes, but also hope and determination.

The banner is part of a new exhibit, "From DP to DC, Displaced Persons: A Story of Ukrainian Refugees in Europe 1945-1952," which runs through Jan. 31 at the museum. The exhibit examines the lives of the thousands of Ukrainians who ended up in the camps after World War II — how they got there, what the camps were like, and, ultimately, their journey to new lives in the United States.

Some quarter-million Ukrainians were left in Germany after the war. About half ended up in the camps — converted army barracks and old warehouses and buildings mostly — rather than return to Ukraine, where they would have been at the mercy of Stalin's troops.

The exhibit features an amazing collection of artifacts from the camps: embroidered blouses and shirts made from parachutes, a punch bowl that was repurposed as a sports trophy, a doctor's collection of equipment that he used to treat people in the camps. There's also a giant map noting about 100 camp locations. Visitors to the museum are asked to put a stickpin in the camp where their family had lived. And there is a reproduction of sleeping quarters found in the camps.

"This is typically what a DP camp bed looked like," says Orest Hrynewych, first vice president of the museum. "Wood construction, lots of army blankets, cardboard suitcases, leather bags, smoking paraphernalia, cooking paraphernalia, things they brought from the old country."

The displaced persons' story is put in a historical context through dozens of copies of documents and photos and nine banners on the museum's south wall. They illuminate different aspects of life in the camps — administration, health and nutrition, sports, religion, theater and so on. All these shaped the Ukrainians and prepared them for their eventual move to the U.S.

"When they came here, these guys were organized," Dudycz says. "They said, 'We're in a country that welcomes us; we're here to show we're good citizens.'"

That ambition was most evident in the emphasis on education in the camps.

"They said one thing they can't take away from you is what's in your mind," Hrynewych says. "So they pushed education. It was their mantra. They set up grade schools, high schools, a university."

"We had to do something with our time," Dudycz says. "There were no classrooms, no textbooks (at first), but the children were gathered, and people who were educated started teaching."

The goal of the exhibit is to tell a story that is unfamiliar to many young Ukrainians, especially those who came to the U.S. after perestroika, the so-called fourth wave of Ukrainian immigrants.

"The main objective is to educate the fourth-wavers to the DP experience. Some of the kids in Saturday school don't even know what a DP is," Hrynewych says.

"It all started about 15 months ago, when we sat around and were talking about immigration," Dudycz says. "Through the conversation, it became apparent that eight out of the nine of us were born in DP camps. We didn't know it. We'd never discussed it. And we wondered, why not? It was nothing to be ashamed about.

"So we said, should we be someplace to house artifacts, or should we educate? We want to tell the good things that came of it."